Background
Registered national charity Changing Lives provides specialist support services for thousands of vulnerable people and their families. From its head offices in Gateshead, and across a number of strategic sites, it works in the community helping and supporting people suffering from homelessness, addiction and other problems, helping to make a positive, lasting change in their lives.
The Challenge
Following relocation to the Team Valley in Gateshead in 2013 to accommodate expansion and growth, Changing Lives needed to upgrade its telephone system to improve connectivity between its head office and a number of satellite sites across the North East and the wider UK.
It also needed to retain existing telephone numbers while ensuring there was a safe link to an offsite centralised data centre in Newcastle.
The Solution
Advantex recommended an approach that would aid growth and development, leading to significant savings on equipment purchase and ongoing operational, support and maintenance costs.
The existing individual remote phone systems were replaced and upgraded to a high performance, digital IP telephone solution based around Mitel IP Mxe controller with RAID systems and utilising advanced SIP trunking technology to enable high quality and low cost calls to be sent and received quickly and easily over the internet.
Seven individual Mitel IP phone systems have so far been installed across the UK, which are connected to over 150 handsets (thereā€™s capacity for 1400 extension on a single main number) and supported by datacentre services. Enterprise software links the whole system together and facilitates the high quality voice calls.
The Results
Thereā€™s no doubt Advantexā€™s solution has delivered benefits for Changing Lives, who required superior telecommunications services as it changes and expands its operations in the face of evolving challenges and a changing infrastructure landscape.
In place now is a far more flexible, robust and reliable phone system, backed-up by on-going maintenance and support, that provides exceptional multi-site communications alongside long-term cost and operational savings.
Furthermore, pre-engineered versatility has been in-built to enable the charity to easily and cost effectively upgrade the system in the future should needs change or extensions be required to accommodate additional handset ā€“ for example, the transfer of numbers from BT to customers own cloud-based solutions can easily be accommodated.